Meeting the English (28 page)

‘Berlin?' said Juliet, who still didn't watch the news.

‘Ay,' said Struan, ‘it's all kicking off out there. And I've got my Standard Grade German, I can talk to folk all right.'

‘Struan,' said Juliet, ‘why are you so cheerful? She doesn't love you. You just said.'

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘but I never thought she did. But I love her, you see. And today I discovered – well, just that I was wrong, about something I thought. I discovered I was right to love her. And I told her all about it, and now I'm leaving. It's better than how I felt before, you know? The boil on the head?' He waved a small white envelope with a stamp. ‘Post box,' he said, crossing the street.

‘Why are you writing to Cricklewood?' asked Juliet, glimpsing the address as he slid it into the slot.

‘I'm not writing,' said Struan, ‘your dad is. Every time he's written something about Jake, OK, or even something that might be about Jake, I've saved it on the computer. And tonight, I printed them all out, and I'm sending them to him. A lot of them are rubbish, mind, but at least he'll get the idea that his dad thinks about him. All the time. And his mum, actually.'

‘Oh, thanks a lot,' said Juliet. ‘Brilliant. Now he'll be round with his ersatz ersatz and his amends and his forgiveness and Celia right up his arse all over again.'

‘I know,' said Struan, ‘but Jake's Phillip's son, and I'm not. They need to be together. It'll be better, when I've gone. At any rate, that's what I'm telling myself.'

They'd reached the lychgate to the Heath. Carefully, Struan squeezed through, holding the gate for Juliet.

‘It's awful dark,' he said. There was no moon. Juliet reached up and tucked her hand into his arm. Struan squeezed it to his warm jumper and they lurched on down a path that seemed, by being invisible, strangely soft, like walking through something: cold black water, or feathers.

‘Did you chuck Mr Fox yet?' asked Struan, into the quiet.

‘No,' said Juliet, ‘but I haven't shagged him yet either.'

‘Are you going to?' asked Struan.

‘Shag or chuck?' asked Juliet.

‘Either.'

‘Dunno. The thing is, it is quite boring, this virginity business. I mean, I can't tell if he likes me, or if he really just wants to shag a virgin.'

‘Well,' said Struan, ‘I guess there's one way to find out.'

‘Exactly,' said Juliet. ‘And anyway, I decided, he's kind of my speed, you know? Second lead.'

‘Second lead?' said Struan.

‘Yeah,' said Juliet. ‘If this was a play, he'd be the comic character, and I'd be the servant or whatever to Celia…'

‘Bollocks,' said Struan.

‘It is not bollocks,' said Juliet. ‘It's the truth.'

‘If Celia's the star,' said Struan, ‘then Jake's the hero, and I'm not having that.'

‘Oh, Jake's not the hero,' said Juliet. ‘You are. Only I didn't notice cos you weren't posh. So I get what I deserve. Ron Fox.'

‘Christ,' said Struan, ‘he's not that bad.'

‘No,' said Juliet, ‘he really isn't. He's always pleased to see me, you know?'

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘there's a lot to be said for that.'

The murky, brownish sky above them cleared briefly, showing a smoky moon. The light revealed a bench, on which they sat down. Struan pulled Juliet into the shelter of his arm.

‘You'll have to look after your dad for me, when I'm gone,' he said.

‘Thought Jake was doing that,' said Juliet.

‘You know what I mean,' said Struan.

‘Yeah,' said Juliet, ‘and I will. I'll even have the time. I just lost my job, you know. Major shoplifting on my watch.'

‘Och, you didnae?' said Struan. ‘I'm sorry.'

Then Juliet said: ‘Struan, don't feel bad about my dad, OK? The thing is, my dad is not that nice. You haven't met him.'

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘I have. I've been washing his arse since July.'

‘No,' said Juliet, ‘my real dad I mean, not the old guy in the wheelchair. I mean,
I
like the wheelchair guy too. My real dad, though, I've been thinking about him a lot, and I think he was a bully, you know? Not just to me or Mum, but Jake as well?'

‘Nobody's perfect,' said Struan.

‘No,' said Juliet, ‘but he wanted to be. He wanted to be the perfect writer. And then we all had to be sort of his scenery; like the perfect family to the famous writer. You know, like Talking Heads?
You may tell yourself: this is not my beautiful wife
?'

‘
When the days go by, and there's no automobile?
' said Struan
.

‘Yeah,' said Juliet. ‘That's the best song. So Mum was his beautiful wife, and he had the MG and Giles and all that, but when she got fat and old, she didn't fit, any more, and so he just dumped her. And Jake, Jake was his beautiful son, all right, but actually, if you think about it, that can't be much good really, even for Jake, because he knows he's only loved if he stays the beautiful son. So then Jake has to control everything too. I mean, I'm not saying Jake's not a total shit, cos he is, but I think Dad made him that way.'

‘How come, then,' said Struan, accepting this analysis, ‘that you're nice?'

‘Because I never made the picture at all,' said Juliet. ‘Because I'm too plain and thick.'

‘Maybe your mum was nice to you when you were wee?' suggested Struan.

‘Possibly,' said Juliet, ‘or my Grandma Davies. But I can't remember it, and there's the truth.' Then the cloud re-closed, and they walked home again in the perfect blackness, holding each other's hand.

*   *   *

Of course, it was all very well Struan spouting that stuff. Happy to be going, Jake's responsibility, all that all that and all that. It didn't mean he believed it at three o'clock in the morning. Oh, he didn't disbelieve Juliet. He thought the evidence was fairly clear, from Phillip's books and his ex-wife and his son, and from all those wee bits Giles let slip, that Phillip had been a steel-clad ocean-going shit, at least for some of his life. But that wasn't the Phillip he had met. Or not the Phillip he had invented, from bits of his own dad, most like.

But even that wasn't the point. The point was, Phillip was stuck in his body, the way prisoners had been stuck in the bottle-dungeon in the castle at St Andrews, target of successive trips from Cuik High School. The
Oubliette.
And the point was, Struan had sworn, on each of those school trips, that no one could deserve that, whatever they might have done, and that should he, Struan Robertson, ever come across someone in a bottle-dungeon, he would not
oublie
them, but get busy with the sandwiches and the string. And now here he was, on the lip of the dungeon, fully equipped with string and sandwiches and unique knowledge of
The Pit and Its Men,
and he was about to walk away. Struan rolled out of bed and crouched on the floorboards of the attic, looking at his fists.

Bill, he thought, might take on the job, for a bit. He seemed distinctly underemployed. And maybe Mr Fox could come over for the typing. It was him that was so damn keen on the play in the first place. And Jake, for Christ's sake, could do a hand's turn for his dad.

But each of those thoughts foundered on the fact of Shirin, Shirin going away soon after him. Then the house would go to Myfanwy, because who else? Giles wouldn't stop her, because he couldn't, and because he wouldn't, because he'd throw up his hairy hands and say, ‘But what can I do, old chap, really?' Because Giles hated Phillip, too, at least a bit. He was nice to him because Bill was into it, Struan reckoned, because it was part of how Giles and Bill got on. But that wouldn't keep Phillip out of a Home. So Myfanwy would put Phillip in a Home and sell the house, if not to this rich American, then to the next one. And there would be no Struan, no Bill, no Mr Fox, no
Pit and Its Men,
no Scrabble board, no Amstrad in Phillip's bottle-dungeon then, just the mossy, granite walls, and Juliet visiting, when she remembered.

From below, Struan heard the click of Shirin, entering the collection rooms, the sigh of a filing cabinet opening. He wondered why he thought Shirin should do her painting and take Phillip's money and yet thought Jake Prys was a thief, and an arse for the way he talked about his acting, and couldn't come up with an answer. He thought of Shirin as he first saw her, drawing Phillip in the study, direct in a shaft of sun. He remembered the strange, still quality of her profile in thought, and the sun shining from his wee picture, and he pushed his body into the boards and let it want what it wanted.

From below came another, furtive, rustling sound and he thought of Shirin taking her grandmother's jewels from the vault under a bed in a house in Tehran, when she was younger than Juliet was now. He remembered her saying, of her grandmother, ‘We were four who were young and she was one who was old.' Then leaving, as he was to leave now.

But he was to leave first. Struan sat up on the floor. That's what Shirin had told him: leave first. Not that she despised him, not that he was too young, but that he was to go. She, not he, would be the one to abandon Phillip. She was going to carry that one for him.

Struan knelt on the floor of the attic, dazzled by the harsh bright gift Shirin had given him for his birthday, by the possibilities of his life. And after a while he crawled into bed, thinking she was right, she was kind, she was clever, and still he could not sleep, that first night of his majority, of his nineteenth year.

*   *   *

Myfanwy Prys wanted her house back, that was all. It was not too much to ask. Each night, as she listened to Underground trains shunt to their bays in the underused wasteland of Cricklewood Station; as she shuddered to the random cries – cats? Youths? – from the Cricklewood street: she longed for the peace of Yewtree Row, the faint hum of traffic interrupted only by cinema-goers returning from the Everyman, broadcasting their clever talk.

She missed the solid walls of Yewtree, leaning sympathetically over the winding street. She missed the sash windows, lovingly maintained by Mr Riley, squaring the southern light. She missed the fine stair of Yewtree, hung like a ribcage in the wide high hall. She missed the cupboards of Yewtree, set in the bays of the sitting room, in the curved walls of the collection rooms, in the depths of the kitchen. The cupboards: the ancient wallpaper and stippling at the back of them, their broad, hand-smoothed, hardwood shelves. There were no cupboards here in Cricklewood, any more than there were linings to the walls or full-sized furniture: she had set it all up that way, to make the rooms look larger, and now clothes bulged out of the horrid canvas arrangements she had set under the eaves, now the sitting room was disfigured by stacks of CDs, and the wicker settee already sagged.

Tonight, into Myfanwy's undersized iron-framed bed, came the sounds of her son Jake joyously poking his girlfriend against the too-thin party wall. Celia's parents would be on the warpath tomorrow. Myfanwy hoped they didn't have the Cricklewood number, or that Juliet would have the sense not to hand it over. She rolled over in bed, pulled the pillow over her ears, and tried to think herself to sleep, as she often did, with a plan for reordering and repainting Yewtree, from the primrose distemper in the new kitchen to the restoration of the drawing room, to the modern brick finish in the attic flat she was planning for Jake.

Tomorrow, she thought, she would go back there. The return of Celia to Jake marked surely the end of the episode of the pond, of the exaggerated worship of Struan Robertson who still, in her mind, needed to answer questions about the missing cash from Phillip's desk. She would go in at a quiet time, using her key, and just walk around a little, checking, for example, whether her plan for a bathroom/bedroom for Juliet in the cellar really was practical, in terms of plumbing; see if perhaps the collection rooms, where she planned a new master suite, had been left unlocked.

And so, drifting in her mind down Yewtree's staircase, turning the china handles of the heavy doors, dandling the lead weights of its darling sash windows, Myfanwy Prys sought sleep, and met it, finally, in the larder, that small shelved room where her daughter Juliet was even then finishing Struan Robertson's birthday cake, and deciding to lose her virginity the very next day to a mostly amiable man named Fox.

27

But Juliet went to work the next day, after all, Miriam having found the Von Estorhof scarf stuffed behind the lingerie. She was on a warning for untidiness, mind, and grumbled a good deal as she strapped herself into her shop-wear jumpsuit.

‘Will you be here when I get back, Struan?' she asked anxiously at the door.

‘Oh,' said Struan, ‘aye. I'm going up to see my gran first, you see. Night bus. I've got my return ticket.'

So Juliet hugged him, and left. Struan went in to Phillip, and took his hand. ‘Pond?' he said, sighing, and felt the jerk for yes, then another, for no.

‘Amstrad?' he said. ‘Writing?' and they gave themselves over.

On the first ‘P' of Pip, Struan flicked to the last act. Pip and Angharad, about to split for ever.

‘I love you, Angharad, but there is a passion greater?' he asked Phillip, and the old man signalled, ‘Yes.' Phillip looked well this morning, thought Struan, he had more colour than he'd seen for days. He turned his attention back to Armprys, to the part in the play where Angharad tries to keep Pip in the village with a terrifying description of domestic bliss.

‘But I also have a passion,' he ad-libbed for Angharad, and Phillip gave his moth's consent. ‘I have,' he went on, borrowing Pip's lines now, from earlier in the play, ‘a passion for the body…' And he fair went off on one then: a mixture of the Song of Solomon, the
Supplementary Material,
and
Portnoy's Complaint,
with which Phillip was thoroughly familiar, judging by his rapid twitches.